History does not follow a teleological path. There is no straight road towards freedom, notes David Motadel, an Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. Throughout modern history, anti-liberal governments have been the norm, not the exception, he writes for History Today:
The most profound authoritarian moment in modern global history was the crisis of liberalism in the interwar years, which gave rise to the likes of Atatürk, Franco (left), Salazar, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler and Stalin. Yet this triumph of authoritarianism, as historian Mark Mazower has shown, was not seen as inevitable after the First World War. Indeed, some observers in the early interwar years were convinced that liberalism had prevailed; in 1921 the intellectual James Bryce proclaimed ‘the universal acceptance of democracy as the normal and natural form of government’. He was soon proven wrong.
“History has shown that we should never take our liberal social and political order for granted,” Motadel adds. “We should always remember how fragile our open societies are. We are in a permanent struggle to defend them.” RTWT
